Analysis and Design of Holonic Manufacturing Systems

Research on Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) is undergoing a huge amount of interest and developments. In spite of the great amount of effort devoted to architectures and algorithms for holonic control of manufacturing systems there are little work about design methodologies. In this work we present a multi agent methodology for analysis and design of HMS, it is based on an abstract agent definition and the PROSA reference architecture for holonic systems. The methodology is organized around five views of the system and integrates the advantages of proven multi agent methodologies to the manufacturing field. An industrial case example from the ceramic domain is presented to show the characteristics of the methodology.